


Taste The Way That You Bleed

by dinglehoppersaplenty



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, M/M, Original Character(s), Psychological Torture, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-18
Updated: 2013-02-18
Packaged: 2017-11-29 18:35:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/690150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinglehoppersaplenty/pseuds/dinglehoppersaplenty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek can’t tell if the thumps and cries around him are his pack or hunters or both, but Stiles needs to get out, get everyone and get out. He doesn't know what the hunters will do to him, but better him than anyone else in the pack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taste The Way That You Bleed

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt meme:
> 
> "Call Me"--a drabble about one character asking for another [be it at the brink of death/in a battlefield/knocking on the front door wounded, feel free to specify]
> 
> I think I took this prompt very loosely but I kind of saw “in a battlefield” and ran with it. Also this is definitely not a drabble. This is ~5600 words of pure indulgence on my part. Because apparently I like writing Derek in pain, who knew? The story takes place in an alternate universe where season 2 never happened beyond the fact of Derek biting all the betas. Peter is still dead, Derek wasn't a completely shitty alpha, and when shit gets real they all come together and kick ass. I make no guarantees about characterization due to this.
> 
> There’s also a playlist for this, found [here](). It’ll help get you in the ~mood. Title of the piece taken from "Kill of the Night" by Gin Wigmore.

There's a thump, a familiar-looking cylinder rolling to his feet; Derek opens his mouth, but the yell to turn back, split up,  _run_ , gets strangled in his throat when the flashbomb goes off (too soon, too soon,) bright and white and blinding, the blast sending Derek sprawling.

He groans at the ringing in his ears, the sound muffling the footsteps and yells of everyone around him. Derek blinks furiously, trying to see, he can't fucking  _see_ , goddammit—

Pushing up to his hands and knees, he shakes his head violently, squeezing his eyes shut, willing his body to heal itself, faster, faster, need to be faster.

"Derek?" he hears, muffled like he was underwater, not enough to tell exactly but it sounds a hell of a lot like Stiles, who shouldn’t even be here in the first place, Derek had told him to  _stay in the car_ while he and Boyd and Isaac went to investigate. Should’ve known better. A hand on his shoulder, helping him to stand, and Derek catches a flash of red, a whiff of salt and pine. "Derek, c'mon!" the voice says, tugging at Derek's shirt.

But Derek shakes his head again; he’s too slow, and there are too many, too many for him to handle like this. He would just slow them down.

He pushes at the hands, staggering a little without their support. "Run!" he yells, voice sounding foreign to his own ears, hoping Stiles understands. " _Run!_ "

He can’t tell if the thumps and cries around him are his pack or hunters or both, but Stiles needs to get out, get everyone and  _get out_. He doesn’t know what the hunters will do to him, but better him than anyone else in the pack.

“Dammit—Derek!” A hand on his shoulder, another on his bicep, tugging even as Derek stumbles and nearly takes them both down.

More hands on him, too many. “Leave him, he said leave him,” a voice that sounds like Boyd says, “we gotta go, we’ll come back for him,  _Stiles_ —”

Suddenly all the hands are gone, the sounds of two pairs of feet scrambling through the brush, Stiles still yelling his name, as Derek’s steps falter over a thick tree root. He hits the ground hard, ears still ringing, eyes still smarting.

Someone grabs the hair on the back of his head, and he snarls, slashing out wildly, only to be tazed in the side, under his outstretched arm. He jerks, hard, but can’t escape the zap of electricity down his side, making him feel numb.

“Now now, Derek,” comes the sickly sweet voice of the huntress through the murk, and Derek snaps his teeth, blindly swiping around with his claws—only for two more tazers to hit him, one in the thigh, the other in the shoulder.

Only they aren't tazers, something more like cattle prods, the electricity never ending, his body’s instinct to shift and protect fighting against the current running through him, each of the three points acting as a conduit for the current to run through and amplify—

Then abruptly one—the huntress’s—is gone, the other two following more reluctantly.

Derek wheezes, one hand clutching at his side, the other clenching jerkily in the dirt, voltage still running through his veins. “I’m going…to rip…you…apart,” he pants, eyes still clenched shut, tight enough to see starbursts.

She makes a tsking sound, and Derek hears her step forward to kick, but he’s too slow, too weak to stop it. She catches him right in the gut, sending him sprawling onto his back, and he coughs, staring into the shadows of his vision, a stray star twinkling through the trees.

“Hit him again,” she says, and the two cattle prods comply, both hitting Derek right in the gut, he can’t breathe, he can’t see, he  _can’t_ —

The last thing he thinks before crossing into the dark is,  _It’s supposed to be over, we killed her, it’s not her_ , the sound of a pleased giggle echoing between his eardrums.

*

He wakes up screaming, a surge of electricity running through his veins. There’s a small giggle as the electricity cuts off, and he pants, staring at the blank cement ceiling above him.

“Good morning, sleeping beauty.”

Derek ignores the voice, taking stock of the situation. The first thing he notices is the burning in his wrists and ankles, bound in rope likely laced with wolfsbane, or soaked in some sort of wolfsbane mixture. The next thing he notices is his bare back against a thin pallet, and then the similar feeling all along his body; he’s nearly naked, save for his boxer briefs.

Great.

Pointedly, he doesn’t look over to where he knows the huntress is standing, watching him. He can hear her heartbeat, steady and calm, along with the thrum of electricity through the wand she’s holding, the soft scuffle of a patrol team above them and outside the door.

“Aw, don’t be like that,” she says, tapping him sharply with the wand. He jerks, a snarl escaping as he glares at her, involuntarily.

She smiles, all white teeth against red painted lips. She looks nothing like Kate—dark skin, shortly cropped hair—but Derek can see the same darkness in her, twisted and malformed. She enjoys this too much.

“So, I’m thinking we’ll start with some electro-therapy,” she says thoughtfully, jabbing at him in a wound in his side that hasn’t healed yet. He roars, straining at his bonds, gnashing his teeth. “Then,” she continues, dragging the wand out of the wound and up across his ribs, “maybe a little…blood work.”

Derek grits his teeth against the pain, keeps his eyes on the ceiling, focuses on his breathing.

“Hey!” she says sharply, whapping him across the chest with the length of the wand. Derek can’t even make a sound at that one, arching against his bonds for the brief moment of contact. “You look at me when I’m talking to you,” she says, like he’s a petulant child, and when Derek doesn’t comply, she grabs his face, fingers digging into his cheeks as she yanks his head to lock eyes with him. He considers closing his eyes out of spite, but doesn’t feel like getting shocked again.

She leans in close, dark brown eyes narrowed. “You think you’re some big, bad, alpha?” she whispers. “You think you can bite four teenagers, turn them into monsters,  _abominations_ , and get away with it?” He glares, breathing heavily through his nose, the only response he’s capable of with her grip on his jaw. She comes in even closer, breath warm on his face, a smile playing at her lips.

“Your little friends? They’ll go quickly.” Derek growls, low in his throat; there’s a smug look in her eye as she continues. “They’re just kids, after all. They don’t know any better.” She looks at him calculatingly. “But you?” she purrs, grip digging into the bones of his jaw. “Baby, by the time I’m through with you…” She smiles, sharp and predatory. “You’ll be  _begging_  me to cut you in half.”

She places a wet smack to his pinched lips, and when he snaps at her as she lets go, she only laughs.

The next shock almost makes him bite off his tongue.

*

Derek loses track of time after that.

She favors the shocking wand the most, delight dancing in her eyes as she watches him pant and writhe and twitch on the table. She uses a knife sometimes too; the added silver in the blade doesn’t do much more than make the slices sting, but the blood still drips sluggishly while his body tries and fails to heal, still hopped up on an electric current. Once she uses wolfsbane, vaporized and pumped into the tiny room, until his throat constricts and his chest seizes, only to clear out the room, plunge him into darkness. He surrenders to his unconsciousness more than once, only to be painful woken up.

When she leaves him, a small patch hooked up to a generator is placed over his heart, the tiniest bit of current running through to keep him docile, until Derek is sure he’s going to go crazy from the dull thrum through his veins.

It’s only ever her. She uses nicknames, “honey” and “sweetie,” until Derek snaps at her. Then she laughs and uses them some more. She tortures him harder when he refuses to look at her, laughing as he strains against his bonds, gnashing his teeth, growling through his pain.

At one point she gives him water, sweet and choking, laced with something that makes him hallucinate.

First he sees Kate, eyes spitting fire and fangs in her mouth, just laughing, laughing, laughing.

“Look at you!” she crows, “poor, pathetic, little boy.” He thrashes at her, wants to claw her throat out again, rip her to pieces and burn the remains. She comes closer, taunting. “You’ve killed your pack twice over now, Derek.” She smiles, tongue slithering through her teeth. “Your body count is higher than mine now!” She laughs and laughs and laughs.

Then she morphs into Laura, more beautiful and terrifying than she ever was in real life.

Laura blames him for the fire. She blames him for her death. She blames him for everything. Derek can’t say anything because she’s right.

He closes his eyes, grits his teeth; his face is wet and he doesn’t know when he started crying.

*

The next time Derek is fully aware of where he is, the lights are out, the now-familiar thrum of electricity running through him. He can’t see in the pitch black, but he can still hear, and from the sound of it, all is generally quiet. There’s the steady thump of boots, pacing above him and outside the door. Steady breathing.

He wishes she would just kill him already. He’s tired of waiting to die.

*

She’s torturing him again.

It’s another knife, or maybe the same one. He gets the feeling that something about the blood turns her on, which makes him want to shudder. He gives in to the urge when she splays her hands over his chest, smearing the red substance across his sweat-slick skin.

“Now, now, baby,” she says, eyes catching his, voice sweet enough to bite. “Don’t you want to look all pretty?”

He’d growl, but he lost his voice, hours, days, years ago.

She giggles yet again, using his blood like fingerpaint across his skin.

That’s when he hears it: a distant howl.

He stiffens, ears straining as the one voice is joined by at least two more. His  _pack_.

She pauses, looks at him like she doesn’t know what he is anymore. “What’re you smiling at?” she snaps, and he didn’t even realize he was smiling.

The howling grows louder, closer, and then she can hear it too. She takes her hands off Derek, looking up at the ceiling like she’ll be able to see through it. She looks somewhat calm, mostly angry, but Derek can smell the fear that makes her heartbeat pick up.

Suddenly the howling cuts off, and then there’s a loud crash from upstairs, the sound of tinkling glass and splintering wood, then three, four,  _five_  werewolves snarling and fighting, taking the two men on patrol to the ground.

Her eyes narrow, still on the ceiling, but she can’t hear the three sets of purposeful footsteps that follow the crash, the calm voice that asks, “Where is he?”

Stiles, the idiot. Derek doesn’t know whether to be proud or pissed off that he put himself into the thick of it.

Neither of the guards respond. There’s a cracking sound, metal on jawbone, and Stiles asks again,  _“Where is he?”_ while whoever he hit groans.

Derek is straining too hard to hear what’s happening above, so he doesn’t know that she’s come closer again until she’s sinking the knife into his gut.

He lets out a roar, louder than anything he’s let out the entire time; it tears his throat apart, makes his chest seize up, and his immediate instinct is to lash out. It burns, it  _burns_ , but he hears something snap, and for the first time, something like fear flashes in her eyes.

“They won’t find you,” she mutters, releasing the blade; her bloody handprint stains the handle. She’s reaching for something behind her back, but Derek is focusing too hard on breathing, on pulling, on  _hoping_.

He can hear the thundering of running footsteps above, the sound of gunshots, doors being smashed open, people  _calling his name_. He pulls and pulls and pulls, thinks he hears the rope tearing just a little bit more—

The sudden chill of gunmetal on his chest makes him still.

He looks up at her, and she’s looking smug. “And even if they do find you down here?” She presses the muzzle deeper into his sternum. “They’ll be too late to save you.”

Derek expects a monologue—she seems like the monologue type—but she just pulls the trigger, quick and simple.

It’s nothing he hasn’t felt before; he’s gotten claws shoved through his back and out his chest and survived. But it hurts. God, it  _hurts_ , the poison in the bullet setting fire to his veins and burning him to ashes from the inside out, the blood spilling out from the would like black bile. He wants to scream, yell, howl, but he can’t catch the breath to do so.

The sounds of fighting are growing closer—somewhere down the hall, rather than above—but he’s fading so quickly. He’s weak, overwrought and overspent, and the bullet is so much closer to his heart this time.

He’s going to die.

It’s a strangely comforting thought. He’s been okay with dying for a long time, really, but he just hopes that no one’s died on this mission for him; it would be so pointless to die for a dead body.

“Derek!” he hears Stiles yell, close, and his heart leaps into his throat.

She smiles thinly. “Is that lover boy, coming to save you?” Her lip curls, and she stretches her arm, gun steady, toward the door. “I guess I’ll just have to put him down too.” They’re almost right outside the door, and no.  _No_.

“No!” he roars, not sure where the strength comes from to pull hard enough to snap the final bit of rope connecting his hands to whatever they’d been attached to, immediately reaching out for her. He’s not even sure what he can do, but he knows he has to stop her. She will  _not_  kill Stiles.

The movement surprises her enough to turn her head, distracting enough as the door bursts open; it’s Isaac first, snarling, claws red and dripping, with Stiles close behind, what looks like his father’s old gun in his hand.

“Derek!” Stiles cries, while Isaac jumps at her. The gun in her hand fires, but Isaac isn’t where she was aiming anymore; he closes in, grabbing her wrist and twisting. Her bones crack and the gun clatters to the floor with a cry of pain.

Stiles has rushed over to Derek, eyes wide and horrified, tucking his gun into the back of his pants. “Jesus Christ, what did they do to you?” His hands flutter, like he doesn’t know what to address first, and Derek really, really wishes he would figure it out. Derek’s vision is going dark around the edges, the poison burning through his skin and he feels the black bile fighting against his gag reflex.

She’s shrieking now; Isaac has taken her broken arm and twisted it behind her, jaws clamped around the meat of her shoulder, painful enough to incapacitate, but not kill, like Derek taught him. When Derek thinks back on it later, he’ll be proud.

Then Stiles hands are on him, bright points that feel cool against his burning skin, yanking the knife from his stomach, sliding through the black slick spurting from his chest. “Oh god, oh god, okay—Isaac! I need her gun!”

Isaac rips his teeth from her, finds it near their feet; she’s still shrieking and thrashing, blood gushing, but Isaac manages to kick the gun, sending it skittering in Stiles’ direction. Stiles flails for it, and as he’s coming up hover over Derek again, he unloads the clip with ease, finding a single bullet. Derek watches with hazy eyes as Stiles digs a lighter out of his pocket.

“You’re gonna be okay,” Stiles says desperately, struggling to open the bullet with slick, shaking fingers. “Oh my god, okay,” he says, finally managing to get it open and the powder poured out.

“Stiles,” Derek finds himself saying; his hands are in Stiles’ shirts, and he’s not sure when that happened.

“Shh, no, I’ve got you,” Stiles says, flicking at a lighter fruitlessly. “Dammit!” he yells, and then it catches and sticks, and the powder lights up like a sparkler. “Yes, thank God,” he murmurs while it fizzles out.

It has to be hot as he scoops it into his hands, but he’s barely even grimacing. His eyes flicker between Derek’s eyes and his hands. “Don’t kill me for this, okay?”

Derek nods absently, eyes trapped in Stiles’. How had he never noticed they were practically already Beta’s eyes? In the right light, they’re gold, shining—

Stiles looks down, and then there’s searing pain ricocheting throughout Derek’s chest, expanding through his body, boiling the blood in his veins, as the poison works itself out. He probably screams, from the way his throat suddenly feels like shredded meat, but then suddenly he can  _breathe_.

He gasps for air as the wound in his chest continues to heal, the rest of the injuries all over his body beginning to knit themselves back together, like his body’s been kick-started into healing. It should be all he can focus on, but he still feels Stiles’ hands on him, unwrapping the rope from his wrists and ankles. Derek doesn’t even know what to do with the newfound freedom, only hissing slightly as the wounds heal.

Stiles is silent the whole time, watching with wide, careful eyes.

Finally,  _finally_ , Derek feels like he’s not a piece of meat run through a grinder, the worst of his injuries mostly healed. The tension in his body snaps, and he slumps against the thin pallet beneath him, still panting and eyes closed. It’s quiet; he’s not sure when or why she stopped screaming, but he’s glad. She must have either passed out or gotten knocked out. He hopes it’s the latter.

“Derek?” Stiles asks tentatively. He can feel one of Stiles’ hands fluttering over his chest, but he catches himself and pulls it back quickly. “Derek, say something.”

“Something,” he grits out, feeling exhausted enough to pass out right on the soiled pallet. He opens his eyes, though, and is glad that he did. Stiles is grinning, part relief and part pride, and it’s a great image.

There’s a noise at the door, and it’s Erica, hovering near the doorframe, Boyd behind her. Both of them are spattered with blood. Derek keeps his eyes open long enough to take in the look of relief on their faces, but then he lets them close, head tipping to the side.

“What’re we gonna do with this?” Erica asks, as Derek listens to Isaac drag her and then twin grunts as Isaac and Erica lift her.

“I dunno,” Isaac says, his voice slightly strained from the effort of holding her up. “We’ll let Derek decide when he’s better.”

“We should just kill her,” Boyd says, and Derek can hear his sneer, would echo it if he were capable of doing anything besides breathing right now.

“Derek might want to do it himself,” Erica mutters, further away now. “I know I would.”

And yes, Derek would very much like to do it himself.

*

Derek is supported out of the room by Boyd and Stiles, after Stiles forces his overshirt on him. (Derek doesn't want to get his blood on it. Stiles isn't having any of that. “It’s cold and you’re almost naked, Derek, just take the damn thing,” and “why do people always insist on stripping you,” are the highlights of the mostly-one-sided conversation. The shirt smells like Stiles, like salt and pine, but also like blood and gunpowder.) They walk past bodies, rubble, awkwardly climb stairs, and in the main room, Jackson and Allison are standing guard over a small group of men and women on their knees, hands on their heads.

“Scott and Lydia went with Isaac and Erica,” Allison reports. One of her arms is in a makeshift sling made out of what looks like one of Scott’s hoodies, but she has her hand ready on a crossbow.

“Glad to see you’re not dead,” Jackson snarks, and Derek smirks when Allison kicks him in the shin. “What?” he says as she glares. “I didn't want to have made this trip for nothing.”

Rolling his eyes, Stiles says, “Here, take him,” and slides out from under Derek’s side. Boyd supports Derek’s weight easily by himself, only shifting him slightly for a better grip. “I’ll take care of these guys,” Stiles says. “You get him home.”

Boyd nods, but Derek reaches out. He doesn't grab Stiles, but the boy jerks as if Derek had, wheeling back until he’s in Derek’s eyeline. “What?”

“Don’t—don’t kill them,” Derek manages to get out. “Unless they deserve it.”

Stiles face settles into something grim but approving. Then he nods, sharply. “Will do.”

Derek nods, then lets Boyd carry him out into the dawn.

*

Derek feels tired enough, but he surprisingly doesn't pass out on the way home. His car purrs in a familiar way underneath him, Boyd’s hands easy on the steering wheel and gear shift, but he almost feels too tired to fall asleep. He keeps his eyes half-open, head tilted back against the seat, as Boyd disregards the speed limits, heading towards the loft that the majority of the pack has been calling home for the past six months.

“How long was I gone?” Derek asks eventually, voice hoarse, and to his credit, Boyd doesn't jump.

He doesn't answer for a few moments, but then he takes a breath, huffs it out through his nose. “Something like 32 hours.” He swallows, adjusts his grip on the steering wheel. “Stiles wanted to go right back after you, but we had to organize. Debated for a bit on whether or not to involve the girls, until they involved themselves.”

Derek nods a little; that sounds like them.

Boyd doesn't say anything for a few more moments. Then his grip tightens on the steering wheel; Derek almost wants to warn him not to dent it. “I wish we’d come sooner. If I’d known what—that bitch was going to do to you, I wouldn't have left you behind.”

“I told you to run,” Derek murmurs.

“Doesn't mean I had to.” He huffs something that’s almost a laugh. “Stiles sure as hell wasn't going to until I dragged him off.”

Derek doesn't know how to respond to that, so he doesn't, hoping the twisting in his stomach is just something like hunger, even though he knows it isn't. Instead, carefully, he reaches out and turns on the radio; it’s something loud and abrasive. He slumps back into the seat, and Boyd leaves it alone.

*

When he walks back into the loft—on his own two feet, Boyd hovering behind him—he’s immediately almost bowled over by Erica, who wraps him up in a fierce yet brief hug.

He returns it gingerly, both of them ignoring the way her eyes are sparkling with moisture as she steps back. “You look like shit,” she says, and it’s so blunt, Derek can’t help but bark out a laugh.

“Really? I didn’t notice.” At the mention of it, he can almost feel the huntresses's hands on him again, smearing his own blood all over, and his lip wants to curl in revulsion. “I’m gonna take a shower,” he says instead, and tries to ignore the way Boyd and Erica are watching him warily.

“We put her in the panic room,” Erica says, when Derek has almost reached the bathroom. He pauses. He can feel the phantom touch again, and rubs at his chest to make it go away, grimacing when it sticks to the blood. “Isaac is watching over, and Scott is taking Lydia home.”

He nods. “Okay.”

When he turns on the water, he turns it up to scalding, letting the small room fill with steam as he sheds Stiles’ shirt and his underwear. He wonders if Stiles will let him burn them afterward.

Once he’s in the shower, he scrubs until his skin is pink and irritated, all physical traces of what she did gone. The more he tries to think about something else, the more he can feel the ghost of her touch on his skin. It takes until the water begins to lose heat that he realizes it’s just not going to come off yet.

He leaves the ruined clothes in the bathroom, wrapping the towel around his waist and heading into the section of the loft that’s partitioned off as his. He pointedly ignores Boyd and Erica, who are sitting on the couch, eyes on him as he passes.

After putting on long sleeves and long pants, Derek crawls into his bed, hoping they’ve got the memo to not wake him up for at least four hours, no matter what happens.

*

It’s dark when he’s woken up by a loud bang, and he has a moment of panic before he realizes his arms aren’t bound together.

He sits up, reaching out with his senses to see if he can find out what woke him up. He quickly finds raised voices, coming from the direction of the panic room in the basement:

“What the hell, Stiles!” Scott is yelling.

“I don’t know!” Stiles yells back. There’s the groaning of the reinforced-steel door, the scuffling of several pairs of feet.

Derek just barely catches the, “Derek’s not going to be happy about this,” that Isaac mutters as two pairs of feet begin clanging up the stairs.

“Stiles, seriously—”

“Shut up, Scott,” Stiles snaps, his voice shaking with more than just his body's movement. “Just shut up, okay?”

“No, this is serious, Stiles! Go-to-jail-for-life serious!”

“I’m aware of that!” Stiles barks, before sliding the door to the loft open. He smells like panic.

Derek stiffly gets to his feet, listens carefully; Scott is breathing heavily like he does when he gets angry, and Stiles is banging around in the kitchen, obviously ignoring his best friend.

Then, abruptly, Stiles stops. There’s a moment, and then Stiles says, “Just go home, Scott.”

Derek pulls the curtain separating his room from the rest of the loft open, just in time to see Scott say, “Or what, you’ll kill me too?”

His eyes snap to Stiles, whose jaw is clenched. “She deserved it. You know she did.”

It’s that moment that Stiles decides to look over, and his face opens in surprise. “Derek.”

Scott whips his head around, and he looks somewhere between guilty and righteously angry. He opens his mouth, but Derek cuts in.

“What happened.”

The friends look between each other, hold a silent conversation between themselves that ends in Stiles huffing dramatically. “The bitch is dead, and I killed her.” He gives Scott a look that seems to say,  _You happy now?_  but Scott just crosses his arms, staring at Stiles accusingly.

A myriad of emotions run through Derek at the admission: disbelief, that Stiles could actually go through with it; wonder, that Stiles actually went through with it; but most of all, rage, that Derek couldn’t finish her off himself, and that Stiles would put himself at risk for something like that.

The silence seems to have taken too long for Stiles, so he rushes to fill it. “She deserved it,” he says unapologetically, but his voice shakes a little. “She—the things she was saying about you, about all of you? And the things she  _did_  to you! You can’t tell me—”

“You shouldn’t have even been there in the first place!” Scott interrupts. “She was dangerous!”

“She had a broken arm and severe blood loss, how dangerous could she have been?” Stiles retorts. He turns back to Derek, a pleading look on his face. “She deserved it, Derek. And I know—I know you probably wanted to do it yourself, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t let her keep talking like that.” His voice almost wobbles as he repeats, “She deserved it.”

When Derek doesn’t say anything, he rounds on Scott. “Like you didn’t want to do the same thing!”

“You had no right!”

“Oh, so I can’t kill anyone, but you can?”

Scott makes a noise of frustration, shaking his head. “At least if—” Scott’s eyes dart to Derek, then back. “If one of us had done it, we could’ve covered it up! That’s a gunshot wound, Stiles, and you know as well as I do that it’s traceable! What if you get caught for this?”

“The bitch is dead,” he repeats, eyes on the ground. “That’s all that matters.”

Scott opens his mouth, but Derek interrupts him again. “Scott, go home.”

He looks enraged, and maybe even a little bit hurt, but he listens, thank God. He shakes his head as he leaves without a word, sliding the door to the loft shut a little bit harder than necessary. Derek waits until he hears his clattering down the stairs before he takes a few steps closer to Stiles, where the boy is leaning against the kitchen counter.

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says, still looking at the floor. “I mean, I’m not sorry she’s dead, but.” He shrugs. “I know it was stupid, but I couldn’t—” He shakes his head, sniffs, and when he looks up, his eyes are wet. “What would you have done, if you were me?”

Derek takes careful, measured steps, his joints still moving stiffly. “What would I have done?” Stiles swallows, nods, eyes on Derek’s as he comes ever closer. “If she had captured  _you_ , and tortured  _you_?”

They’re in each other’s spaces now. Derek can hear Stiles’ heart beating loud and clear, rabbit fast. He smells like salt and pine and traces of gunpowder, like heat and fear and desire.

“If I were in your place,” Derek says slowly, curving a hand under Stiles’ jaw, close enough that Stiles can’t concentrate on both of Derek’s eyes at once, his gaze flickering between them, "she would've left the house in pieces."

Stiles smirks, a hand settling tentatively on Derek’s waist. “Yeah?”

Derek nods, and his eyes flicker to Stiles’ lips. There’s a long moment, where Derek doubts himself. This…thing between them has been growing for  _years_. He tries to ignore it, for the most part, put the pack’s needs in front of his own, but this is only one occasion out of many where he and Stiles have put themselves, put others at risk, just to save each other.

But he doesn’t get the chance to think about it much longer, because suddenly Stiles pushes forward, closing the small distance between them and pressing their mouths together with little finesse. Derek inhales sharply through his nose, and Stiles’ hand flexes on his hip when Derek presses in, using his hand on Stiles’ jaw to tilt his head where he wants it.

Stiles’ mouth drops open, a small noise escaping, and Derek seizes the opportunity, letting his tongue tease at the space between his lips. Stiles makes another noise, his other hand reaching up to wrap around Derek’s bicep and pull him closer.

Suddenly the loft door is being pulled open with a loud, metallic screech, and Derek breaks his mouth away to growl at whoever it is.

Isaac is wide-eyed, Erica looks like she could positively crow in victory, and Boyd just raises an eyebrow and smirks.

Stiles clears his throat, moving his hands away from Derek jerkily. “Uh, hey guys,” he says, clearing his throat again when his voice is higher than normal. “What’s up?”

Isaac manages to close his jaw, and jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “We’ve got a dead body downstairs, just wondering what you wanted us to do with it,” he says, addressing it to Derek. When Stiles drops his hand from Derek’s waist and leans back a little, trying to put a little space between them, Derek grabs his hand, puts it back, pulls him closer, without looking away from his betas. They all watch the interaction curiously, but Isaac just asks, “Did you want to…?”

Derek shakes his head. He’s almost glad Stiles took care of it, now that he thinks about it; even now that she’s dead, he feels a strange mixture of rage and residual helplessness build up in him. He’s sure that if he saw even her dead body right now, he’d tear it to shreds. “Take care of it.”

Isaac nods, and he and Boyd turn to head back downstairs. Erica lingers, her eyes traveling slowly down Derek and Stiles’ bodies, eyebrow raised.

“Did you need something?” Derek growls, and she smirks.

“Make sure to put a sock on the door before we come back.”

Stiles sputters, but she merely cackles, sliding the door shut as she follows the boys. Derek cuts off Stiles sputtering with another kiss, and Stiles relaxes into it. When they break apart again, Stiles is panting slightly.

“You’re still an idiot,” Derek murmurs into Stiles’ jawbone. “The whole thing was reckless, and stupid. You could have gotten killed.”

Stiles laughs breathlessly into Derek's neck, adjusting his grip to the back of Derek’s shirt, pulling him even closer. “Worth it.”


End file.
